Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook

Word to the wise: This article was posted in April of 2006 and hasn't been updated since. However, people still thank me every day for posting it and find that it works -- Just know that things might not go exactly as they did in April 2006, so be ready for a surprise or two ;)

Google recently released a new service that's an online calendar for scheduling your day and planning and organizing events with your friends, enemies, co-workers, co-worker friends, enemies from work, and all other variation of enemy, friend, and co-worker. Anyone who uses the calendar in Microsoft Outlook will find the layout to be quite familiar, and everyone can appreciate Google Calendar's simplistic and eye-friendly design. Very Web 2.0.

The best thing about Google Calendar is that it's online. We here at Grinn Productions do a lot of web-based applications and have developed plenty of them for our clients. However, they do have their limitations. A major one is that of hardware support. We are impressed with how Google has given this application a very "it's not a web page, it's a program" sort of feel, but not even Google can integrate a web-page to your Bluetooth phone (although I can think of a few ways they could, but that's another article.)

So we have a dilemma. We have this wonderful, beautifully crafted web-based calendar program and no way to sync it with our cell phone. Thankfully, there's a project over at SourceForge called Remote Calendars which allows us to download our Google Calendars to Outlook 2003 at the click of a button. The installation is a bit tricky, so I'll walk you through it and show you a few tricks along the way.

1. Close all instances of Outlook.
2. Visit the Remote Calendars download section and download the latest copy of the Remote Calendars zip file.
3. Extract and run setup.exe from the downloaded zip file.
4. If you get an error message saying "The Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime is not installed.", you'll have to download and install VSTO 2005 from Microsoft's Downloads Center then run the Remote Calendars setup again.
5. If you get an error message saying "The Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies have not been installed.", take a trip back to Microsoft's Download Center; This time to download and install the Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies. Don't let the technical jargon scare you. It's just a simple download and install.
6. Once you have Remote Calendars installed, open Microsoft Outlook. It may take a while to load the first time you run it after installing Remote Calendars.
7. When Outlook opens, you'll be presented with the Options Screen. You can tweak these as you like, or leave them as the defaults.
8. You'll notice a new toolbar that looks like this:
9. Click on the "Subscribe a remote calendar" button (the +.)
10. The dialog prompts you for your Remote calendar's url. In a separate browser, go to calendar.google.com or click here. Click on the down arrow next to the name of the first (or perhaps only) calendar you want synced with Outlook and select Calendar Settings. Right-click on the icon next to Private Address and select Copy Shortcut (or Copy Link Location in Firefox.)
11. Go back to Outlook and paste that url into the "Remote calendar's url" field.
12. Enter whatever you want for a name for this calendar, and adjust any other settings you like then hit Ok.
13. If you have more calendars on Google Calendars that you'd like synced with Outlook, complete steps 10-12 for each additional calendar.
14. Click on the "Reload all iCalendars" button in the plug-in's toolbar (second from the left) and all your Google Calendars will be imported into Outlook! Click this button whenever you make changes to your Google Calendar that you want imported.

Now all your Google Calendar items will work with your Outlook alerts, and you can sync them with your phone or PDA.

Here's a few extra tips for tweaking your Remote Calendars:

• If you imported your Outlook calendar into Google Calendars, using Remote Calendar will put duplicates of each item into your Outlook calendar. I haven't found a good way to do this, but here's what I did:
• Once you're comfortable with Remote Calendar, delete all your Remote Calendars using the "delete remote calendars" button.
• Manually delete all the entries from your Outlook calendar that would conflict. Your Outlook calendar at this point should be basically bare.
• Re-enter your entries into Remote Calendar. You'll then have just the entries imported from Google Calendar.
• If you have multiple calendars on Google Calendar, you can make entries from your separate Google Calendar appear in different colors in Outlook much like they do in Google Calendar. Here's an example of how to do this:
• Let's say on Google Calendar you have two main calendars, Business and Personal colored blue and green, respectively.
• When adding your Business calendar to Remote Calendar, click on the "Add categories to this calendar" button and select Business. Select whatever other options you prefer, then click Ok.
• When viewing your calendar in Outlook, go to Edit>Automatic Formatting in this toolbar.
• Click the Add button. Type in Business for the name, and select Business for the label.
• Click the Condition button. Select the More Choices tab. Type Business in the Category field and click Ok, and Ok.
• Do the same for Personal, substituting Personal for Business. Now your personal items in Outlook will appear in green, and your business items in blue. You can do the same thing for any type of category with any of the available label colors.
• Any items you add directly to your Outlook calendar will not show up on your Google Calendar.
• If you have synchronization software for your cell phone or PDA that works with Outlook, it will now be NSync (bwaahahaha!) with your Google Calendar as well!
• To have your Outlook sync with your Google Calendars whenever Outlook is loaded, go to the Options in Remote Calendar (rightmost button on the toolbar) and check the Automatic Update check box. Be careful! If you have a lot of items in your Google Calendar and this option selected, Outlook could take a long time to load.

Well, I hope this helps someone out there. If you did find this article helpful, put me on your calendar to thank me later!

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